I've never heard of J.D. Lasica. Why'd I buy his book? I've forgotten, but it was a lucky find. Quick, order your copy before they run out! Oh, wait, I guess Amazon can't run out of a digital book, they just custom clone one for each customer. Lucky you. Still, you should hurry. That way you will have this treat all the sooner.
Only when I finished every thrilling, rich, detailed, entrancing, breath-holding page did I discover that J.D. has written more. I love that, finding out that once I've found pure gold there is more to look forward to. (I wanted to throw more superlative adjectives into the sentence before last, but alas constrained myself to only five.)
What makes this author so good? First, he paints the characters with such realism and detail that I know them, identify with their weaknesses and strengths, and anguish over their agonies. Except for the bad guys, that is. In their case, I suffer to think that any of my fellow humans could be so messed up, and yet in the same heartbeat I'm saddened to realize that they almost surely endured hellish childhoods and upbringing. Their evil ways, as I've often seen in over six decades of careful observation, come more nurture than nature. If I weren't so busy hating them, perhaps I'd feel bad and sad for them. As Ender liked to say about the Buggers, "When you know your enemy completely, you love him." While we're there, Orson Scott Card draws the same kind of detailed, keenly correct characters. Likening Lasica to Card is reasonable, I think.
Then there's the story, what beauty and richness! I didn't have 2,782 characters to keep track of, as I did in The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. (I googled, "how many characters are in the Wheel of Time?" How did we *ever* live without Google??) There were just a handful of characters, maybe 10 or 20. That allowed me to know them and follow the interplay between them. Yet they, like the story they wove (i.e. the plot), were never predictable, never trite or boring. They were just like the people where I work, where I go to church. That recalls one of my colleagues at work. Who on earth would marry such a psychological mess?! Yet, I believe his wife loves him and thinks she got the deal of the decade. Perhaps he describes me to her just like I describe him to my fortunately non-judgmental sweetie (which happens only in my extremely rare moments of weakness, I want you to believe). In other words, as I seem to keep coming back to, Lasica's characters are perfectly portrayed with good and evil actions, attitudes that are uplifting or badly twisted, feelings from joy to sorrow, and all the other things that my neighbor in the house next door has. That is, they're humans.
I wanted to say more about the plot but what I've said must suffice. Likewise, addressing the scientific and technical correctness would be fun. I hoped to tell how I held my breath for two days and had turned blue by the time I finished reading and listening to the book (I listen when I'm driving, read when I'm sitting). You, too, can profit from running this whole story through your head so you vicariously learn the uplifting lessons of life contained in the story. Just invest the cost of a pastry, and look forward to some of the happiest and most engaged days of your reading life. Promise. Sue me if I'm wrong.
Wait, I just remembered an especially important characteristic (to me, anyway). The book ends! There is a denouement! Mr. Lasica is willing to resolve plot elements, explain things where needed, get rid of bad people where appropriate, and reward goodness. He avoids the modern trend that goes like this: "I'll just stop the story here. You go through the hard work of figuring out an ending for yourself. I'm sure you will love deciding whether the world is better or worse after the partial story I've set down on paper (on monitor?). Anyway, bringing all these threads to closure is hard work, which I can avoid. Resolving romantic tensions in a reasonable way is time-consuming. Instead, you do all that stuff, but I'll charge you for a whole book anyway."
If, dear reader of this review, you gather that I have decided feelings about authors copping out, you are correct. I usually feel deceived and taken advantage of when I get to the end of Chapter 15 of a 20-chapter book, flip the screen to the beginning of Chapter 16, and am faced with, 'The End'." The author apparently feels they can write more books per year if they save the time required to write 10% or 15% of each book. Or some feeling like that, I suppose. Then again, maybe they think the five centuries of people reading complete stories is enough of that, and modern readers love writing 15% of all the books they read. For me, one such book is all the puzzling I spend money on. I switch to people like J.D. Lasica, may they live forever. Long enough at least, to write a bunch more books. The world needs more J.D. Lasicas.
--Eben Visher, Sacramento, California
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